Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 96 (96.0.4664.35) for Android: it's now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
Krishna Govind
Google Chrome
Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 96 (96.0.4664.27) for Android: it's now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
Krishna Govind
Google Chrome
Do you hear that? Click, tap, kaching! The frenzy of the year-end shopping season is upon us. In Asia, that means big shopping occasions like 10/10, 11/11 and 12/12. It also — unfortunately — means an increase in risks that users face, as more people head online and the range of threats from cybercrime increases.
According to data from the United Nations, cybercrime has already risen 600% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But how and why are people still at risk? Where are people most vulnerable? And what can we do differently to better protect ourselves online, not just during shopping season, but all year round? To find out, we commissioned a study, conducted by YouGov, surveying over 13,000 respondents aged 18 and above across Asia-Pacific. Here are our findings, and our top tips for staying safe online.
Poor password “hygiene” is far too common in Asia-Pacific, with over 80% of respondents using the same passwords across multiple sites, and almost half admitting to recycling passwords for up to 10 unique sites. If a password is stolen on any of these sites, a user’s accounts on the other sites become vulnerable as well. A worrying 1 in 2 respondents also confessed to using guessable passwords with easily-crackable combinations, such as significant dates and names of partners or pets.
What do we suggest people do instead?
According to our study, two in three respondents across Asia-Pacific have experienced a data breach or know someone who has. Here are some ways you can protect yourselves against fraud.
More than 60% of people we surveyed said they are likely to adopt 2SV, but only 6% of people we surveyed currently use it. We know the best way to keep people safe is to turn on Google security protections by default. By the end of 2021, we plan to auto-enroll an additional 150 million Google users in 2SV and require two million YouTube creators to turn it on.
Three in four people admit to making purchases on pages without the secure symbol, increasing the opportunity for fraudsters to steal details.
We recentlyannounced HTTPS-first mode in Chrome. HTTPS is a secure and private way for people to communicate with websites. If you enable this mode, Chrome will show you a warning if a website doesn’t support HTTPS.
We also recommend making sure you're always running the latest version of software on all your devices. Some software, like Chrome, will automatically update. For other services that send notifications when it’s time to update, don’t click “remind me later”— take the time to install the update right away.
As you get your shopping lists ready, we encourage you to find more online security tips by visiting Google’s Safety Center. You can also explore this virtual exhibition to learn more about Google’s approach to security and privacy. Happy shopping!
The Beta channel is being updated to 96.0.4664.25 (Platform version: 14268.18.0) for most Chrome OS devices.
Despite the success and widespread adoption of smartphones, using them to compose longer pieces of text is still quite cumbersome. As one writes, grammatical errors can often creep into the text (especially undesirable in formal situations), and correcting these errors can be time consuming on a small display with limited controls.
To address some of these challenges, we are launching a grammar correction feature that is directly built into Gboard on Pixel 6 that works entirely on-device to preserve privacy, detecting and suggesting corrections for grammatical errors while the user is typing. Building such functionality required addressing a few key obstacles: memory size limitations, latency requirements, and handling partial sentences. Currently, the feature is capable of correcting English sentences (we plan to expand to more languages in the near future) and available on almost any app with Gboard1.
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| Gboard suggests how to correct an ungrammatical sentence as the user types. |
Model Architecture
We trained a sequence-to-sequence neural network to take an input sentence (or a sentence prefix) and output the grammatically correct version — if the original text is already grammatically correct, the output of the model is identical to its input, indicating that no corrections are needed. The model uses a hybrid architecture that combines a Transformer encoder with an LSTM decoder, a combination that provides a good balance of quality and latency.
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| Overview of the grammatical error correction (GEC) model architecture. |
Mobile devices are constrained by limited memory and computational power, which make it more difficult to build a high quality grammar checking system. There are a few techniques we use to build a small, efficient, and capable model.
By employing these techniques, the resulting model takes up only 20MB of storage and performs inference on 60 input characters under 22ms on the Google Pixel 6 CPU.
Training the Model
In order to train the model, we needed training data in the form of <original, corrected> text pairs.
One possible approach to generating a small on-device model would be to use the same training data as a large cloud-based grammar model. While this data produces a reasonably high quality on-device model, we found that using a technique called hard distillation to generate training data that is better-matched to the on-device domain yields even better quality results.
Hard distillation works as follows: We first collected hundreds of millions of English sentences from across the public web. We then used the large cloud-based grammar model to generate grammar corrections for those sentences. This training dataset of <original, corrected> sentence pairs is then used to train a smaller on-device model that can correct full sentences. We found that the on-device model built from this training dataset produces significantly higher quality suggestions than a similar-sized on-device model built on the original data used to train the cloud-based model.
Before training the model from this data, however, there is another issue to address. To enable the model to correct grammar as the user types (an important capability of mobile devices) it needs to be able to handle sentence prefixes. While this enables grammar correction when the user has only typed part of a sentence, this capability is particularly useful in messaging apps, where the user often omits the final period in a sentence and presses the send button as soon as they finish typing. If grammar correction is only triggered on complete sentences, it might miss many errors.
This raises the question of how to decide whether a given sentence prefix is grammatically correct. We used a heuristic to solve this — if a given sentence prefix can be completed to form a grammatically correct sentence, we then consider it grammatically correct. If not, it is assumed to be incorrect.
| What the user has typed so far | Suggested grammar correction | |
| She puts a lot | ||
| She puts a lot of | ||
| She puts a lot of effort | ||
| She puts a lot of effort yesterday | Replace "puts" with "put in". |
| GEC on incomplete sentences. There is no correction for valid sentence prefixes. |
We created a second dataset suitable for training a large cloud-based model, but this time focusing on sentence prefixes. We generated the data using the aforementioned heuristic by taking the <original, corrected> sentence pairs from the cloud-based model’s training dataset and randomly sampling aligned prefixes from them.
For example, given the <original, corrected> sentence pair:
Original sentence: She puts a lot of effort yesterday afternoon.
Corrected sentence: She put in a lot of effort yesterday afternoon.
We might sample the following prefix pairs:
Original prefix: She puts
Corrected prefix: She put in
Original prefix: She puts a lot of effort yesterday
Corrected prefix: She put in a lot of effort yesterday
We then autocompleted each original prefix to a full sentence using a neural language model (similar in spirit to that used by SmartCompose). If a full-sentence grammar model finds no errors in the full sentence, then that means there is at least one possible way to complete this original prefix without making any grammatical errors, so we consider the original prefix to be correct and output <original prefix, original prefix> as a training example. Otherwise, we output <original prefix, corrected prefix>. We used this training data to train a large cloud-based model that can correct sentence prefixes, then used that model for hard distillation, generating new <original, corrected> sentence prefix pairs that are better-matched to the on-device domain.
Finally, we constructed the final training data for the on-device model by combining these new sentence prefix pairs with the full sentence pairs. The on-device model trained on this combined data is then capable of correcting both full sentences as well as sentence prefixes.
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| Training data for the on-device model is generated from cloud-based models. |
Grammar Correction On-Device
Gboard sends a request to the on-device grammar model whenever the user has typed more than three words, whether the sentence is completed or not. To provide a quality user experience, we underline the grammar mistakes and provide replacement suggestions when the user interacts with them. However, the model outputs only corrected sentences, so those need to be transformed into replacement suggestions. To do this, we align the original sentence and the corrected sentence by minimizing the Levenshtein distance (i.e., the number of edits that are needed to transform the original sentence to the corrected sentence).
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| Extracting edits by aligning the corrected sentence to the original sentence. |
Finally, we transform the insertion edits and deletion edits to be replacement edits. In the above example, we transform the suggested insertion of "in" to be an edit that suggests replacing "puts" with "put in". And we similarly suggest replacing “effort on” with “effort”.
Conclusion
We have built a small high-quality grammar correction model by designing a compact model architecture and leveraging a cloud-based grammar system during training via hard distillation. This compact model enables users to correct their text entirely on their own device without ever needing to send their keystrokes to a remote server.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the key contributions of the other team members, including Abhanshu Sharma, Akshay Kannan, Bharath Mankalale, Chenxi Ni, Felix Stahlberg, Florian Hartmann, Jacek Jurewicz, Jayakumar Hoskere, Jenny Chin, Kohsuke Yatoh, Lukas Zilka, Martin Sundermeyer, Matt Sharifi, Max Gubin, Nick Pezzotti, Nithi Gupta, Olivia Graham, Qi Wang, Sam Jaffee, Sebastian Millius, Shankar Kumar, Sina Hassani, Vishal Kumawat, and Yuanbo Zhang, Yunpeng Li, Yuxin Dai. We would also like to thank Xu Liu and David Petrou for their support.
1The feature will eventually be available in all apps with Gboard, but is currently unavailable for those in WebView. ↩
The Beta channel has been updated to 96.0.4664.27 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Sagar Kamdar, VP of Product Management
The app experiences that you as developers build help people around the world in ways we couldn’t have imagined, and at Android Dev Summit, happening over the next two days, we’ll talk about that spirit - focusing on the user, understanding their needs, and then building experiences to delight them. We just wrapped up the keynote, and over the next two days, we’ll focus on an important theme for Android: helping you build excellent apps, across devices. First on updates to our modern Android development offering to help you stay more productive so you can focus on building great applications, and then helping you extend those apps across devices to all form factors. And as a big part of this, we’re introducing the 12L feature drop on foldables and tablets - a set of features optimising Android 12 for large screens - read on to learn more!
When it comes to helping you build excellent apps, our expanding collection of development tools, APIs, language, and distribution technologies–Modern Android Development, MAD for short–are your partners to help you stay more productive. And we’ve got a number of new features across MAD to help you be productive and create better apps, starting with one of our biggest announcements: the introduction of Material You and its radical new design vision into Jetpack Compose, Android's modern toolkit for building native UI.
Material You, introduced in Android 12 earlier this year at Google I/O, focuses on delivering experiences that are personal for every style, accessible for every need, and adaptive for every screen. We’re releasing the first alpha of Compose Material 3, which offers Material Design 3 styled components and theme, enabling Material You personalization features like dynamic color. We’re also releasing the first beta version of Jetpack Compose 1.1 with features like stretch overscroll for Android 12, improved touch-target sizing, experimental lazy layout animations, and more. Jetpack Compose is stable and ready for use in production and we continue to add the features you need to make it fast and easy to build Android UI across all form factors, with new support for Wear OS and for building homescreen widgets.
Beyond Compose, Jetpack continues to add the features you’ve been asking us for. Navigation adds multiple backstacks support. WorkManager, our recommended solution for persistent work, makes it easier to handle Android 12 background restrictions, adding support for expedited jobs. Room adds auto-migration and multi-map relations. DataStore, our recommended replacement for SharedPreferences, has reached 1.0 and Macrobenchmark, a tool to measure and improve startup and frame performance, added simplified and more accurate frame timing, and compatibility back to Android M.
We also have updates to help you build across Android form factors. Learn more about how being available across different Android devices and form factors is helping Spotify achieve their mission of connecting billions of fans with millions of creators.
Large screens have seen some incredible momentum: a 92% Year-over-Year growth in Chrome OS, making it the fastest growing desktop OS in the world, a 20% growth in tablet sales in the last year and a 2.5x growth in foldables sales, the newest and most innovate form factor…altogether those represent over 250M active large screen Android devices - and Android is giving you an OS to match. And we’ve got some… *large* news to *unfold* here: a developer preview of an upcoming feature drop for Android 12, with updates added JUST for large screens; we call it 12L. With 12L we’ve optimised and polished the system UI for large screens, made multitasking more powerful and intuitive, and improved our compatibility support for apps so they look better right out of the box. You can try the new large-screen features today as part of the 12L developer preview. Check out what is in 12L and how we’re making it easier to build for large screens here.
Many developers have created helpful experiences for the latest version of Wear OS which launched earlier this year, and we're looking forward to richer, more immersive app experiences like what we’re seeing from Strava, Spotify, and Calm. Jetpack Compose makes building UIs so much faster and easier - so we’re bringing Compose support to Wear OS. Compose for Wear OS is now in developer preview, with new samples and documentation to help you get started. The Tiles API, now in Beta, provides predictable, glanceable access to information and quick actions. We’ve also partnered with Samsung to make it easier to design watch faces. Watch Face Studio, created by Samsung, allows you to produce your own watch faces without any coding, so watch you see..is watch you get. You can read more about all of the Wear OS news here.
We’ve invested in more ways to power your business growth on Google Play. To strengthen user trust, we’ve introduced the Data safety section to highlight your privacy practices and the Play Integrity API to make sure your app installs are always genuine. We’ve also invested in more tools and features to help boost your app quality and recently updated our programs so that 99% of developers qualify for a service fee of 15% or less. To learn more, check out our blog post or watch the full session.
We just dropped over 30 technical sessions, which you can watch here at your own pace. And over the next two days, we have a lot more live content for you to enjoy - including your opportunity to get your burning #AskAndroid questions answered by the team who built Android on topics like Modern Android Development, Large Screens, or Compose with Material You. Plus, we’ll also be hosting live Android Code-Alongs, where you can tune in to watch Android experts as they code, tackle programming challenges, and answer your questions live across Jetpack Compose and Compose for Wear OS. You can check out the full agenda with timings here. While we can’t wait for the opportunity to connect with you in person soon, we’re excited to engage with you remotely over the next two days. Enjoy your #AndroidDevSummit!
Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
There are over a quarter billion large screen devices running Android across tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. In just the last 12 months we’ve seen nearly 100 million new Android tablet activations–a 20% year-over-year growth, while ChromeOS, now the fastest growing desktop platform, grew by 92%. We’ve also seen Foldable devices on the rise, with year on year growth of over 265%! All told, there are over 250 million active large screen devices running Android. With all of the momentum, we’re continuing to invest in making Android an even better OS on these devices, for users and developers.
So today at Android Dev Summit, we announced a feature drop for Android 12 that is purpose-built for large screens, we’re calling it 12L, along with new APIs, tools, and guidance to make it easier to build for large screens. We also talked about changes we’re making to Google Play to help users discover your large-screen optimized apps more easily. Read on to see what’s new for large screens on Android!
Today we're bringing you a developer preview of 12L, our upcoming feature drop that makes Android 12 even better on large screens. With the preview, you can try the new large screen features, optimize your apps, and let us know your feedback.
In 12L we’ve refined the UI on large screens across notifications, quick settings, lockscreen, overview, home screen, and more. For example, on screens above 600dp, the notification shade, lockscreen, and other system surfaces use a new two-column layout to take advantage of the screen area. System apps are also optimized.
Two-column layouts show more and are easier to use
We’ve also made multitasking more powerful and intuitive - 12L includes a new taskbar on large screens that lets users instantly switch to favorite apps on the fly. The taskbar also makes split-screen mode more discoverable than ever - just drag-and-drop from the taskbar to run an app in split-screen mode. To make split-screen mode a better experience in Android 12 and later, we’re helping users by automatically enabling all apps to enter split screen mode, regardless whether the apps are resizable.
Drag and drop apps into split-screen mode
Last, we’ve improved compatibility mode with visual and stability improvements to offer a better letterboxing experience for users and help apps look better by default. We’ve made letterboxing easily customizable by device manufacturers, who can now set custom letterbox colors or treatments, adjust the position of the inset window, apply custom rounded corners, and more.
We plan to release the 12L feature drop early next year, in time for the next wave of Android 12 tablets and foldables. We’re already working with our OEM partners to bring these features to their large screen devices - watch for the developer preview of 12L coming soon to the Lenovo P12 Pro. With the features coming to devices in the few months ahead, now is a great time to optimize your apps for large screens.
For developers, we highly recommend checking out how your apps work in split screen mode with windows of various sizes. If you haven’t optimized your app yet, see how it looks in different orientations and try the new compatibility mode changes if they apply. Along with the large screen features, 12L also includes a handful of new APIs for developers, along with a new API level. We’ve been careful not to introduce any breaking changes for your apps, so we won’t require apps to target 12L to meet Google Play requirements.
To get started with 12L, download the 12L Android Emulator system images and tools from the latest preview release of Android Studio. Review the features and changes to learn about areas to test in your apps, and see preview overview for the timeline and release details. You can report issues and requests here, and as always, we appreciate your feedback!
12L is for phones, too, but since most of the new features won’t be visible on smaller screens, for now we’re keeping the focus on tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. Later in the preview we plan to open up Android Beta enrollments for Pixel devices. For details, visit developer.android.com/12L.
It's time to start designing fully adaptive apps to fit any screen, and now we're making it even easier. To help you get ready for these changes in the OS and Play, along with the developer preview we're releasing updates to our APIs, tools and guidance.
The first step to supporting adaptive UI is designing your app to behave nicely on both a small and a larger screen. We’ve been working on new Material Design guidance that will help you scale your app’s UI across all screens. The guidance covers common layout patterns prevalent in the ecosystem that will help inspire and kick-start your efforts.
Adaptive UI patterns in the Material Design guidelines
To provide the best possible navigation experience to your users, you should provide a navigation UI that is tailored to the Window Size Class of the user’s device. The recommended navigation patterns include using a navigation bar for compact screens and a navigation rail for medium-width device classes and larger (600dp+). For expanded-width devices, there are several ideas on larger screen layouts within our newly released Material Design guidance such as a List/Detail structure that can be implemented, using SlidingPaneLayout. Check out our guidance on how to implement navigation for adaptive UIs in Views and Compose.
While updating the navigation pattern and using a SlidingPaneLayout is a great way to apply a large screen optimized layout to an existing application with fragments, we know many of you have applications based on multiple activities. For those apps, the new activity embedding APIs released in Jetpack WindowManager 1.0 beta 03 make it easy to support new UI paradigms, such as a TwoPane view. We’re working on updating SlidingPaneLayout to support those APIs - look for an update in the coming months.
Jetpack Compose makes it easier to build for large screens and diverse layouts. If you’re starting to adopt Compose, it’s a great time to optimize for large screens along the way.
Compose is a declarative UI toolkit; all UI is described in code, and it is easy to make decisions at runtime of how it should adapt to the available size. This makes Compose especially great for developing adaptive UI, as it is very easy to handle UI changes across different screen sizes or components. The Build adaptive layouts in Compose guide covers the basics of what you need to know.
The Jetpack WindowManger library provides a backward-compatible way to work with windows in your app and build responsive UI for all devices. Here’s what’s new.
Activity embedding
Activity embedding lets you take advantage of the extra display area of large screens by showing multiple activities at once, such as for the List-Detail pattern, and it requires little or no refactoring of your app. You determine how your app displays its activities—side by side or stacked—by creating an XML configuration file or making Jetpack WindowManager API calls. The system handles the rest, determining the presentation based on the configuration you’ve created.
Activity embedding works seamlessly on foldable devices, stacking and unstacking activities as the device folds and unfolds. If your app uses multiple activities, activity embedding can enhance your user experience on large screen devices. Try the activity embedding APIs in Jetpack WindowManager 1.0 Beta 03 and later releases. More here.
Activity embedding with Jetpack WindowManager
Use Window size classes to help detect the size of your window
Window Size Classes are a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints for you to design, develop and test resizable application layouts against. The Window Size Class breakpoints have been split into three categories: compact, medium, and expanded. They have been designed specifically to balance layout simplicity with the flexibility to optimize your app for the most unique use cases, while representing a large proportion of devices in the ecosystem. The WindowSizeClass APIs will be coming soon in Jetpack WindowManager 1.1 and will make it easier to build responsive UIs. More here.
Window Size Classes in Jetpack WindowManager
Make your app fold-aware
WindowManager also provides a common API surface for different window features, like folds and hinges. When your app is fold aware, the content in the window can be adapted to avoid folds and hinges, or to take advantage of them and use them as natural separators. Learn how you can make your app fold aware in this guide.
Reference Devices
Since Android apps should be built to respond and adapt to all devices and categories, we’re introducing Reference Devices across Android Studio in many tools where you design, develop and test UI and layout. The four reference devices represent phones, large foldable inner displays, tablets, and desktops. We’ve designed these after analyzing market data to represent either popular devices or rapidly growing segments. They also enable you to ensure your app works across popular breakpoint combinations with the new WindowSizeClass breakpoints, to ensure your app covers as many use cases as possible.
Reference Device definitions
Layout validation
If you’re not sure where to get started adapting your UI for large screens, the first thing you can do is use new tools to identify potential issues impacting large screen devices. In Android Studio Chipmunk, we’re working on a new visual linting tool to proactively surface UI warnings and suggestions in Layout Validation, including which reference devices are impacted.
Layout validation tool with Reference Device classes
Resizable emulator
To test your app at runtime, we can use the new resizable emulator configuration that comes with Android Studio Chipmunk. The resizable emulator lets you quickly toggle between the four reference devices - phone, foldable, tablet, and desktop. This makes it easier to validate your layout at design time and test the behavior at runtime, both using the same reference devices. To create a new Resizable emulator, use the Device Manager in Android Studio to create a new Virtual Device and select the Resizable device definition with the Android 12L (Sv2) system image.
Resizable Android Emulator
To make it easier for people to find the best app experiences on their tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices, we're making changes in Play to highlight apps that are optimized for their devices.
We’re adding new checks to assess each app’s quality against our large screen app quality guidelines to ensure that we surface the best possible apps on those devices. For apps that are not optimized for large screens, we’ll start warning large screen users with a notice on the app’s Play Store listing page.
We'll also be introducing large screen specific app ratings, as announced earlier this year, so users will be able to rate how your app works on their large screen devices. These changes are coming next year, so we're giving you advanced notice to get your apps ready!
Also, make sure to check out our post that highlights how we are evolving our business model to address developer needs in Google Play.
To help you get started with building for large screens and foldables, no matter whether you’re using Views or Compose, we’ve got you covered! We’re launching new and updated guidance on how to support different screen sizes both in a new and in an existing app, how to implement navigation for both Views and Compose, how to take advantage of foldable devices and more. Check them out in the large screens guides section for Views support or in the Compose guides section.
Nothing speaks louder than code - we updated the following samples to support responsive UIs:
For some hands-on work, check out our Support foldable and dual-screen devices with Jetpack WindowManager updated codelab.
Posted by Alex Musil, Director of Product, Google Play
At this year’s Android Developer Summit, we shared new features we’ve been building to help power your growth on our platform, including enhancements to trust and safety, tools to boost your app quality and improve monetization, some updates for games, and an exciting new app marketing certificate.
Watch the whole session below, or keep reading for the highlights.
We've made important changes to ensure all types of businesses can be successful on Google Play. We now have multiple programs designed to support our app ecosystem with 99% of developers qualifying for a service fee of 15% or less.
Recently, we announced that starting January 1, 2022, we’re decreasing the service fee for all subscriptions on Google Play from 30% to 15%. Additionally, we're making changes to the Play Media Experience program, where ebooks and on-demand music streaming services will now be eligible for service fees as low as 10%.
For more information about our service fees, please see our FAQs.
Earlier this year, we shared details about the upcoming Data safety section in the Play Store, which will let users know what type of data your app collects and shares and how that data is used. By giving you a way to showcase your approach to privacy and security, we’re not only building trust, we’re helping users make informed decisions about the apps they install and use.
Users will see the new Data safety section in the Play Store starting in February 2022. You have until April 2022 before your apps must have this section completed and approved, but we encourage you to fill out the required Data Safety form in Play Console now. For more information, including guidance on how to fill out the form, watch our “Get prepared for the Data safety section” session.
We regularly update our policies to make Google Play a safe and trustworthy experience. Check out our Policy Center or this PolicyBytes video for new announcements from this week. You can also join our policy webinars and send in your questions, available for multiple regions (Global, India, Japan, or Korea).
Another way that we’re protecting both you and our users is by investing in new developer tools that help you protect your apps and games from abuse and attack, so you can ensure your users have the experience you intend. The new Play Integrity API will let you determine if you’re interacting with your genuine app binary, installed by Google Play, and running on a genuine Android device that’s powered by Google Play services. If not, you can decide how best to introduce additional friction and reduce the risk to your app.
The Play Integrity API will be rolling out to all developers over the next few months. To learn more, watch our “Play Integrity API” session and express interest in early access.
We've released several updates to help you improve the performance of your app.
First, we’re making it easier for you to be alerted to and fix new issues with improvements to Android vitals. Your most recent data is now more visible to help you see issues right away, and we’ve added trends, filters, and app version information to help you identify the source of the issue quickly.
We also recently launched a new tool in Play Console called Reach and devices to help you understand which features or fixes would help you reach the most users on Google Play. By understanding your user and issue distribution, you can make better decisions about which specs to build for, where to launch, and what to test to make the biggest impact.
We’re making changes to the way users evaluate your app quality, too. One of the most important ways that users assess your app is by checking your ratings and reviews. That’s why starting in November, users on phones will start to see ratings specific to their registered country. Then, in early 2022, users will see ratings specific to the device that they’re on, including form factors such as tablets, Chromebooks, and wearables. You can preview your location-specific and device-specific ratings in Play Console now, and we encourage you to check them out so you have time to make any app quality improvements you need before the new ratings go into effect in the Play Store.
To help you better monetize your apps and games, we continue to invest in modernizing our platform, including updates to the Billing Library. Billing Library version 3, which was announced June 2020, includes new ways for users to pay, subscription promotion capabilities, purchase attribution for games, and improvements to purchase reliability and security. As a reminder, all updates to existing apps must use Billing Library version 3 or newer by November 1, 2021. Learn more about updating to Billing Library version 3 or newer — which requires few updates to your code — in the release notes.
We’re also excited to announce a new feature in the Billing Library: in-app messaging. Today, subscription users who go into payment decline often aren’t aware of it, or experience too much friction to fix their payment. That’s why we’ve launched a new API that can detect whether a user is in payment decline and show a helpful message right in your app, so the user can immediately fix the payment without leaving the app to go to the Play Store. Best of all, the integration is super easy — just a single line of code. On average, our early-access partners saw a 99% improvement in subscription recovery and spend for users who saw the message. In-app messaging will be available in the next Billing Library release, so stay tuned for more information.
The updated sign-in API for Play Games Services, which drastically simplifies the sign-in implementation, is now in early access. The new SDK makes for a one-line implementation.
We’ve also simplified the setup for users, combining the Google Play Games install and profile creation in one step. This allows users to get back to their game more quickly, even when they don’t have Play Games installed. We’re also streamlining the process of opting in to auto-sign-in for an even smoother experience for returning users.
But that’s not all. Because needing to have the Google Play Games app installed is creating friction for some users, starting in 2022, Play Games Services will no longer require this installation. This change will allow 2 billion users to sign in to your Play Games Services-enabled games with a zero-touch experience. More details are coming soon. You can express your interest in the early access program on our developer site.
Last but not least, we also announced the launch of the Google Play Store Listing Certificate. This new program is designed to help app marketers demonstrate their proficiency and skills in Play Store listing best practices.
To get certified, app marketers can take online training that will help you best tell your app or game’s story on Google Play. You’ll learn key skills that will help you drive growth through high-quality and policy-compliant store listings. After the training, take the exam to get an industry-recognized certificate.
We hope you take advantage of all these new features and programs to grow your businesses on Google Play. Please continue sharing your feedback so we can build the tools you need to power your growth. Thank you for being part of the Google Play community.
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Posted by Eric McCleve, Google Play Academy Programs Lead
At Google Play, our goal is to help developers and marketers reach and resonate with over 2 Billion users who visit our platform every month looking for high quality content and services. Having a great store listing experience can be a huge benefit in helping achieve user acquisition goals for your app or game.
To help you get the most out of our store listing tools and features, we’re excited to announce a new Store Listing Certificate on Google Play Academy. The certificate is designed for both learners who have an app or game on Google Play and want to improve its store listing, or aspiring app makers who want to build in-demand mobile marketing skills. The training and exam cover:
Watch this video to learn more about the training and exam certificate
To get certified, you can take online training on Google Play Academy and learn best practices to help you best tell your app or game’s story. You’ll learn key skills that will help you drive growth through high-quality and policy-compliant store listings. After the training, take the exam to get an industry-recognized certificate. You will also be invited to join Google Developer Certification Directory, a network of Google certified developers.
Mohamed Kamara, founder of InovCares, a health startup that modernizes healthcare for women, learned app store listing best practices from Google Play Academy.
Hear Mo explain how Google Play Academy’s training helped him better tell his app’s story on Google Play
Start training and get certified. Happy learning!
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